The door cracked open. Isabelle was standing there in a black slip, her hair lying long and tangled over her shoulders. Simon had never seen her like this: barefoot, with her hair unbrushed, and no makeup on. “You can come in.”
He stepped past her into the room. In the light from the door he could see that it looked, as his mother would have said, like a tornado had hit it. Clothes were scattered across the floor in piles, a duffel bag open on the floor as if it had exploded. Isabelle’s bright silver-gold whip hung from one bedpost, a lacy white bra from another. Simon averted his eyes. The curtains were drawn, the lamps extinguished.
Isabelle flopped down on the edge of the bed and looked at him with bitter amusement. “A blushing vampire. Who would have guessed.” She raised her chin. “So, I let you in. What do you want?”
Despite her angry glare, Simon thought she looked younger than usual, her eyes huge and black in her pinched white face. He could see the white scars that traced her light skin, all over her bare arms, her back and collarbones, even her legs. If Clary remains a Shadowhunter, he thought, one day she’ll look like this, scarred all over. The thought didn’t upset him as once it might have done. There was something about the way Isabelle wore her scars, as if she was proud of them.
She had something in her hands, something she was turning over and over between her fingers. It was a small something that glinted dully in the half-light. He thought for a moment it might be a piece of jewelry.
“What happened to Max,” Simon said. “It wasn’t your fault.”
She didn’t look at him. She was staring down at the object in her hands. “Do you know what this is?” she said, and held it up. It seemed to be a small toy soldier, carved out of wood. A toy Shadowhunter, Simon realized, complete with painted-on black gear. The silver glint he’d noticed was the paint on the little sword it held; it was nearly worn away. “It was Jace’s,” she said, without waiting for him to answer. “It was the only toy he had when he came from Idris. I don’t know, maybe it was part of a bigger set once. I think he made it himself, but he never said much about it. He used to take it everywhere with him when he was little, always in a pocket or whatever. Then one day I noticed Max carrying it around. Jace must have been around thirteen then. He just gave it to Max, I guess, when he got too old for it. Anyway, it was in Max’s hand when they found him. It was like he grabbed it to hold on to when Sebastian—when he—” She broke off. The effort she was making not to cry was visible; her mouth was set in a grimace, as if it were twisting itself out of shape. “I should have been there protecting him. I should have been there for him to hold on to, not some stupid little wooden toy.” She flung it down onto the bed, her eyes shining.
“You were unconscious,” Simon protested. “You nearly died, Izzy. There was nothing you could have done.”
Isabelle shook her head, her tangled hair bouncing on her shoulders. She looked fierce and wild. “What do you know about it?” she demanded. “Did you know that Max came to us the night he died and told us he’d seen someone climbing the demon towers, and I told him he was dreaming and sent him away? And he was right. I bet it was that bastard Sebastian, climbing the tower so he could take the wards down. And Sebastian killed him so he couldn’t tell anyone what he’d seen. If I’d just listened—just taken one second to listen—it wouldn’t have happened.”
“There’s no way you could have known,” Simon said. “And about Sebastian—he wasn’t really the Penhallows’ cousin. He had everyone fooled.”
Isabelle didn’t look surprised. “I know,” she said. “I heard you talking to Alec and Jace. I was listening from the top of the stairs.”
“You were eavesdropping?”
She shrugged. “Up to the part where you said you were going to come and talk to me. Then I came back here. I didn’t feel like seeing you.” She looked at him sideways. “I’ll give you this much, though: You’re persistent.”
“Look, Isabelle.” Simon took a step forward. He was oddly, suddenly conscious of the fact that she wasn’t very dressed, so he held back from putting a hand on her shoulder or doing anything else overtly soothing. “When my father died, I knew it wasn’t my fault, but I still kept thinking over and over of all the things I should have done, should have said, before he died.”
“Yeah, well, this is my fault,” Isabelle said. “And what I should have done is listened. And what I still can do is track down the bastard who did this and kill him.”
“I’m not sure that’ll help—”
“How do you know?” Isabelle demanded. “Did you find the person responsible for your father’s death and kill him?”
“My father had a heart attack,” Simon said. “So, no.”
“Then you don’t know what you’re talking about, do you?” Isabelle raised her chin and looked at him squarely. “Come here.”
“What?”
She beckoned imperiously with her index finger. “Come here, Simon.”
Reluctantly he came toward her. He was barely a foot away when she seized him by the front of his shirt, yanking him toward her. Their faces were inches apart; he could see how the skin below her eyes shone with the marks of recent tears. “You know what I really need right now?” she said, enunciating each word clearly.
“Um,” Simon said. “No?”
“To be distracted,” she said, and with a half turn yanked him bodily onto the bed beside her.
He landed on his back amid a tangled pile of clothes. “Isabelle,” Simon protested weakly, “do you really think this is going to make you feel any better?”
“Trust me,” Isabelle said, placing a hand on his chest, just over his unbeating heart. “I feel better already.”
Clary lay awake in bed, staring up at a single patch of moonlight as it made its way across the ceiling. Her nerves were still too jangled from the events of the day for her to sleep, and it didn’t help that Simon hadn’t come back before dinner—or after it. Eventually she’d voiced her concern to Luke, who’d thrown on a coat and headed over to the Lightwoods’. He’d returned looking amused. “Simon’s fine, Clary,” he said. “Go to bed.” And then he’d left again, with Amatis, off to another one of their interminable meetings at the Accords Hall. She wondered if anyone had cleaned up the Inquisitor’s blood yet.
With nothing else to do, she’d gone to bed, but sleep had remained stubbornly out of reach. Clary kept seeing Valentine in her head, reaching into the Inquisitor and ripping his heart out. The way he had turned to her and said, You’d keep your mouth shut. For your brother’s sake, if not your own. Above all, the secrets she had learned from Ithuriel lay like a weight on her chest. Under all these anxieties was the fear, constant as a heartbeat, that her mother would die. Where was Magnus?
There was a rustling sound by the curtains, and a sudden wash of moonlight poured into the room. Clary sat bolt upright, scrabbling for the seraph blade she kept on her bedside table.
“It’s all right.” A hand came down on hers—a slender, scarred, familiar hand. “It’s me.”
Clary drew her breath in sharply, and he took his hand back. “Jace,” she said. “What are you doing here? What’s wrong?”
For a moment he didn’t answer, and she twisted to look at him, pulling the bedclothes up around her. She felt herself flush, acutely conscious of the fact that she was wearing only pajama bottoms and a flimsy camisole—and then she saw his expression, and her embarrassment faded.
“Jace?” she whispered. He was standing by the head of her bed, still wearing his white mourning clothes, and there was nothing light or sarcastic or distant in the way he was looking down at her. He was very pale, and his eyes looked haunted and nearly black with strain. “Are you all right?”
“I don’t know,” he said in the dazed manner of someone just waking up from a dream. “I wasn’t going to come here. I’ve been wandering around all night—I couldn’t sleep—and I kept finding myself walking here. To you.”
She sat up straighter, letting the bedclothes fall down around her hips. “Why can’t you sleep? Did something happen?” she asked, and immediately felt stupid. What hadn’t happened?
Jace, however, barely seemed to hear the question. “I had to see you,” he said, mostly to himself. “I know I shouldn’t. But I had to.”
“Well, sit down, then,” she said, pulling her legs back to make a space for him to sit at the edge of the bed. “Because you’re freaking me out. Are you sure nothing’s happened?”
“I didn’t say nothing happened.” He sat down on the bed, facing her. He was close enough that she could have just leaned forward and kissed him—
Her chest tightened. “Is there bad news? Is everything—is everyone—”
“It’s not bad,” said Jace, “and it’s not news. It’s the opposite of news. It’s something I’ve always known, and you—you probably know it too. God knows I haven’t hid it all that well.” His eyes searched her face, slowly, as if he meant to memorize it. “What happened,” he said, and hesitated, “is that I realized something.”
“Jace,” she whispered suddenly, and for no reason she could identify, she was frightened of what he was about to say. “Jace, you don’t have to—”
“I was trying to go … somewhere,” Jace said. “But I kept getting pulled back here. I couldn’t stop walking, couldn’t stop thinking. About the first time I ever saw you, and how after that I couldn’t forget you. I wanted to, but I couldn’t stop myself. I forced Hodge to let me be the one who came to find you and bring you back to the Institute. And even back then, in that stupid coffee shop, when I saw you sitting on that couch with Simon, even then that felt wrong to me—I should have been the one sitting with you. The one who made you laugh like that. I couldn’t get rid of that feeling. That it should have been me. And the more I knew you, the more I felt it—it had never been like that for me before. I’d always wanted a girl and then gotten to know her and not wanted her anymore, but with you the feeling just got stronger and stronger until that night when you showed up at Renwick’s and I knew.
“And then to find out that the reason I felt like that—like you were some part of me I’d lost and never even knew I was missing until I saw you again—that the reason was that you were my sister, it felt like some sort of cosmic joke. Like God was spitting on me. I don’t even know for what—for thinking that I could actually get to have you, that I would deserve something like that, to be that happy. I couldn’t imagine what it was I’d done that I was being punished for—”
“If you’re being punished,” Clary said, “then so am I. Because all those things you felt, I felt them too, but we can’t—we have to stop feeling this way, because it’s our only chance.”
Jace’s hands were tight at his sides. “Our only chance for what?”
“To be together at all. Because otherwise we can’t ever be around each other, not even just in the same room, and I can’t stand that. I’d rather have you in my life even as a brother than not at all—”
“And I’m supposed to sit by while you date boys, fall in love with someone else, get married …?” His voice tightened. “And meanwhile, I’ll die a little bit more every day, watching.”
“No. You won’t care by then,” she said, wondering even as she said it if she could stand the idea of a Jace who didn’t care. She hadn’t thought as far ahead as he had, and when she tried to imagine watching him fall in love with someone else, marry someone else, she couldn’t even picture it, couldn’t picture anything but an empty black tunnel that stretched out ahead of her, forever. “Please. If we don’t say anything—if we just pretend—”
“There is no pretending,” Jace said with absolute clarity. “I love you, and I will love you until I die, and if there’s a life after that, I’ll love you then.”
She caught her breath. He had said it—the words there was no going back from. She struggled for a reply, but none came.
“And I know you think I just want to be with you to—to show myself what a monster I am,” he said. “And maybe I am a monster. I don’t know the answer to that. But what I do know is that even if there’s demon blood inside me, there is human blood inside me as well. And I couldn’t love you like I do if I weren’t at least a little bit human. Because demons want. But they don’t love. And I—”
He stood up then, with a sort of violent suddenness, and crossed the room to the window. He looked lost, as lost as he had in the Great Hall standing over Max’s body.
“Jace?” Clary said, alarmed, and when he didn’t answer, she scrambled to her feet and went to him, laying her hand on his arm. He continued staring out the window; their reflections in the glass were nearly transparent—ghostly outlines of a tall boy and a smaller girl, her hand clamped anxiously on his sleeve. “What’s wrong?”
“I shouldn’t have told you like that,” he said, not looking at her. “I’m sorry. That was probably a lot to take in. You looked so … shocked.” The tension underlying his voice was a live wire.
“I was,” she said. “I’ve spent the past few days wondering if you hated me. And then I saw you tonight and I was pretty sure you did.”
“Hated you?” he echoed, looking bewildered. He reached out then and touched her face, lightly, just the tips of his fingers against her skin. “I told you I couldn’t sleep. Tomorrow by midnight we’ll be either at war or under Valentine’s rule. This could be the last night of our lives, certainly the last even barely ordinary one. The last night we go to sleep and get up just as we always have. And all I could think of was that I wanted to spend it with you.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “Jace—”
“I don’t mean it like that,” he said. “I won’t touch you, not if you don’t want me to. I know it’s wrong—God, it’s all kinds of wrong—but I just want to lie down with you and wake up with you, just once, just once ever in my life.” There was desperation in his voice. “It’s just this one night. In the grand scheme of things, how much can one night matter?”
Because think how we’ll feel in the morning. Think how much worse it will be pretending that we don’t mean anything to each other in front of everyone else after we’ve spent the night together, even if all we do is sleep. It’s like having just a little bit of a drug—it only makes you want more.
But that was why he had told her what he had, she realized. Because it wasn’t true, not for him; there was nothing that could make it worse, just as there was nothing that could make it better. What he felt was as final as a life sentence, and could she really say it was so different for her? And even if she hoped it might be, even if she hoped she might someday be persuaded by time or reason or gradual attrition not to feel this way anymore, it didn’t matter. There was nothing she had ever wanted in her life more than she wanted this night with Jace.
“Close the curtains, then, before you come to bed,” she said. “I can’t sleep with this much light in the room.”
The look that washed over his face was pure incredulity. He really hadn’t expected her to say yes, Clary realized in surprise, and a moment later he had caught her and hugged her to him, his face buried in her still-messy-from-sleep hair. “Clary …”
“Come to bed,” she said softly. “It’s late.” She drew away from him and returned to the bed, crawling up onto it and drawing the covers up to her waist. Somehow, looking at him like this, she could almost imagine that things were different, that it was many years from now and they’d been together so long that they’d done this a hundred times, that every night belonged to them, and not just this one. She propped her chin on her hands and watched him as he reached to jerk the curtains shut and then unzipped his white jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. He was wearing a pale gray T-shirt underneath, and the Marks that twined his bare arms shone darkly as he unbuckled his weapons belt and laid it on the floor. He unlaced his boots and stepped out of them as he came toward the bed, and he stretched out very carefully beside Clary. Lying on his back, he turned his head to look at her. A very little light filtered into the room past the edge of the curtains, just enough for her to see the outline of his face and the bright gleam of his eyes.
“Good night, Clary,” he said.
His hands lay flat on either side of him, his arms at his sides. He seemed barely to be breathing; she wasn’t sure she was breathing herself. She slid her own hand across the bedsheet, just far enough that their fingers touched—so lightly that she would probably hardly have been aware of it had she been touching anyone but Jace; as it was, the nerve endings in her fingertips prickled softly, as if she were holding them over a low flame. She felt him tense beside her and then relax. He had shut his eyes, and his lashes cast fine shadows against the curve of his cheekbones. His mouth curled into a smile as if he sensed her watching him, and she wondered how he would look in the morning, with his hair messed and sleep circles under his eyes. Despite everything, the thought gave her a jolt of happiness.
She laced her fingers through his. “Good night,” she whispered, and her hand clasped in Jace’s as if they were children in a fairy tale, she fell asleep beside him in the dark.
15
THINGS FALL APART
LUKE HAD SPENT MOST OF THE NIGHT WATCHING THE MOON’S progress across the translucent roof of the Hall of Accords like a silver coin rolling across the clear surface of a glass table. When the moon was close to full, as it was right now, he felt a corresponding sharpening in his vision and sense of smell, even when he was in human form. Now, for instance, he could smell the sweat of doubt in the room, and the underlying sharp tang of fear. He could sense the restless worry of his pack of wolves out in Brocelind Forest as they paced the darkness beneath the trees and waited for news from him.
“Lucian.” Amatis’s voice in his ear was low but piercing. “Lucian!”
Snapped out of his reverie, Luke fought to focus his exhausted eyes on the scene in front of him. It was a ragged little group, those who had agreed to at least listen to his plan. Fewer than he had hoped for. Many he knew from his old life in Idris—the Penhallows, the Lightwoods, the Ravenscars—and just as many he had just met, like the Monteverdes, who ran the Lisbon Institute and spoke in a mixture of Portuguese and English; or Nasreen Chaudhury, the stern-featured head of the Mumbai Institute. Her dark green sari was patterned in elaborate runes of such a bright silver that Luke instinctively flinched when she passed too close.
“Really, Lucian,” said Maryse Lightwood. Her small white face was pinched by exhaustion and grief. Luke hadn’t really expected either her or her husband to come, but they had agreed almost as soon as he’d mentioned it to them. He supposed he ought to be grateful they were here at all, even if grief did tend to make Maryse more sharp-tempered than usual. “You’re the one who wanted us all here; the least you can do is pay attention.”
“He has been.” Amatis sat with her legs drawn under her like a young girl, but her expression was firm. “It’s not Lucian’s fault that we’ve been going around in circles for the past hour.”
“And we’ll keep going around and around until we figure out a solution,” said Patrick Penhallow, an edge to his voice.
“With all due respect, Patrick,” said Nasreen, in her clipped accent, “there may be no solution to this problem. The best we can hope for is a plan.”
“A plan that doesn’t involve either mass slavery or—” began Jia, Patrick’s wife, and then she broke off, biting her lip. She was a pretty, slender woman who looked very like her daughter, Aline. Luke remembered when Patrick had run off to the Beijing Institute and married her. It had been something of a scandal, as he’d been supposed to marry a girl his parents had already picked out for him in Idris. But Patrick never had liked to do what he was told, a quality for which Luke was now grateful.
“Or allying ourselves with Downworlders?” said Luke. “I’m afraid there’s no way around that.”
“That’s not the problem, and you know it,” said Maryse. “It’s the whole business about seats on the Council. The Clave will never agree to it. You know that. Four whole seats—”
“Not four,” Luke said. “One each for the Fair Folk, the Moon’s Children, and the children of Lilith.”
“The warlocks, the fey, and the lycanthropes,” said soft-voiced Senhor Monteverde, his eyebrows arched. “And what of the vampires?”
“They haven’t promised me anything,” Luke admitted. “And I haven’t promised them anything either. They may not be eager to join the Council; they’re none too fond of my kind, and none too fond of meetings and rules. But the door is open to them should they change their minds.”
“Malachi and his lot will never agree to it, and we may not have enough Council votes without them,” muttered Patrick. “Besides, without the vampires, what chance do we have?”
“A very good one,” snapped Amatis, who seemed to believe in Luke’s plan even more than he did. “There are many Downworlders who will fight with us, and they are powerful indeed. The warlocks alone—”
With a shake of her head Senhora Monteverde turned to her husband. “This plan is mad. It will never work. Downworlders cannot be trusted.”
“It worked during the Uprising,” said Luke.
The Portuguese woman’s lips curled back. “Only because Valentine was fighting with fools for an army,” she said. “Not demons. And how are we to know his old Circle members will not go back to him the moment he calls them to his side?”
“Be careful what you say, Senhora,” rumbled Robert Lightwood. It was the first time he had spoken in more than an hour; he’d spent most of the evening motionless, immobilized by sorrow. There were lines in his face Luke could have sworn hadn’t been there three days ago. His torment was plain in his taut shoulders and clenched fists; Luke could hardly blame him. He had never much liked Robert, but there was something about the sight of such a big man made helpless by grief that was painful to witness. “If you think I would join with Valentine after Max’s death—he had my boy murdered—”
“Robert,” Maryse murmured. She put her hand on his arm.
“If we do not join with him,” said Senhor Monteverde, “all our children may die.”
“If you think that, then why are you here?” Amatis rose to her feet. “I thought we had agreed—”
So did I. Luke’s head ached. It was always like this with them, he thought, two steps forward and a step back. They were as bad as warring Downworlders themselves, if only they could see it. Maybe they’d all be better off if they solved their problems with combat, the way the pack did—
A flash of movement at the doors of the Hall caught his eye. It was momentary, and if it had not been so close to the full moon, he might not have seen it, or recognized the figure who passed quickly before the doors. He wondered for a moment if he was imagining things. Sometimes, when he was very tired, he thought he saw Jocelyn—in the flicker of a shadow, in the play of light on a wall.
But this wasn’t Jocelyn. Luke rose to his feet. “I’m taking five minutes for some air. I’ll be back.” He felt them watching him as he made his way to the front doors—all of them, even Amatis. Senhor Monteverde whispered something to his wife in Portuguese; Luke caught “lobo,” the word for “wolf,” in the stream of words. They probably think I’m going outside to run in circles and bark at the moon.
The air outside was fresh and cold, the sky a slate-steel gray. Dawn reddened the sky in the east and gave a pale pink cast to the white marble steps leading down from the Hall doors. Jace was waiting for him, halfway down the stairs. The white mourning clothes he wore hit Luke like a slap in the face, a reminder of all the death they’d just endured here, and were about to endure again.
Luke paused several steps above Jace. “What are you doing here, Jonathan?”
Jace said nothing, and Luke mentally cursed his forgetfulness—Jace didn’t like being called Jonathan and usually responded to the name with a sharp objection. This time, though, he didn’t seem to care. The face he raised to Luke was as grimly set as the faces of any of the adults in the Hall. Though Jace was still a year away from being an adult under Clave Law, he’d already seen worse things in his short life than most adults could even imagine.
“Were you looking for your parents?”
“You mean the Lightwoods?” Jace shook his head. “No. I don’t want to talk to them. I was looking for you.”
“Is it about Clary?” Luke descended several steps until he stood just above Jace. “Is she all right?”
“She’s fine.” The mention of Clary seemed to make Jace tense all over, which in turn sparked Luke’s nerves—but Jace would never say Clary was all right if she weren’t.
“Then what is it?”
Jace looked past him, toward the doors of the Hall. “How is it going in there? Any progress?”
“Not really,” Luke admitted. “As much as they don’t want to surrender to Valentine, they like the idea of Downworlders on the Council even less. And without the promise of seats on the Council, my people won’t fight.”
Jace’s eyes sparked. “The Clave is going to hate that idea.”
“They don’t have to love it. They only have to like it better than they like the idea of suicide.”
“They’ll stall,” Jace advised him. “I’d give them a deadline if I were you. The Clave works better with deadlines.”
Luke couldn’t help but smile. “All the Downworlders I can summon will be approaching the North Gate at twilight. If the Clave agrees to fight with them by then, they’ll enter the city. If not, they’ll turn around. I couldn’t leave it any later than that—it barely gives us enough time to get to Brocelind Plain by midnight as it is.”
Jace whistled. “That’s theatrical. Hoping the sight of all those Downworlders will inspire the Clave, or scare them?”
“Probably a little of both. Many of the Clave members are associated with Institutes, like you; they’re a lot more used to the sight of Downworlders. It’s the native Idrisians I’m worried about. The sight of Downworlders at their gates might send them into a panic. On the other hand, it can’t hurt for them to be reminded how vulnerable they are.”
As if on cue, Jace’s gaze flicked up to the ruins of the Gard, a black scar on the hillside over the city. “I’m not sure anyone needs more reminders of that.” He glanced back at Luke, his clear eyes very serious. “I want to tell you something, and I want it to be in confidence.”
Luke couldn’t hide his surprise. “Why tell me? Why not the Lightwoods?”
“Because you’re the one who’s in charge here, really. You know that.”
Luke hesitated. Something about Jace’s white and tired face drew sympathy out of his own exhaustion—sympathy and a desire to show this boy, who had been so betrayed and badly used by the adults in his life, that not all adults were like that, that there were some he could rely on. “All right.”
“And,” Jace said, “because I trust you to know how to explain it to Clary.”
“Explain what to Clary?”
“Why I had to do it.” Jace’s eyes were wide in the light of the rising sun; it made him look years younger. “I’m going after Sebastian, Luke. I know how to find him, and I’m going to follow him until he leads me to Valentine.”
Luke let his breath out in surprise. “You know how to find him?”
“Magnus showed me how to use a tracking spell when I was staying with him in Brooklyn. We were trying to use my father’s ring to find him. It didn’t work, but—”
“You’re not a warlock. You shouldn’t be able to do a tracking spell.”
“These are runes. Like the way the Inquisitor watched me when I went to see Valentine on the ship. All I needed to make it work was something of Sebastian’s.”
“But we went over this with the Penhallows. He left nothing behind. His room was utterly cleared out, probably for exactly this reason.”
“I found something,” said Jace. “A thread soaked in his blood. It’s not much, but it’s enough. I tried it, and it worked.”
“You can’t go haring off after Valentine on your own, Jace. I won’t let you.”
“You can’t stop me. Not really. Unless you want to fight me right here on these steps. You won’t win, either. You know that as well as I do.” There was a strange note in Jace’s voice, a mixture of certainty and self-hatred.
“Look, however determined you may be to play the solitary hero—”
“I am not a hero,” Jace said. His voice was clear and toneless, as if he were stating the simplest of facts.
“Think of what this will do to the Lightwoods, even if nothing happens to you. Think of Clary—”
“You think I haven’t thought of Clary? You think I haven’t thought of my family? Why do you think I’m doing this?”
“Do you think I don’t remember what it’s like to be seventeen?” Luke answered. “To think you have the power to save the world—and not just the power but the responsibility—”
“Look at me,” said Jace. “Look at me and tell me I’m an ordinary seventeen-year-old.”
Luke sighed. “There’s nothing ordinary about you.”